Hear your agent suffer through your code

152

AAndrewVos about 8 hours ago 75 commentsRead Article on github.com

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Discussion (75 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

AndrewVos•about 7 hours ago

Hi Hacker News, I'm Andrew, the CTO of Endless Toil.

Endless Toil is building the emotional observability layer for AI-assisted software development.

As engineering teams adopt coding agents, the next challenge is understanding not just what agents produce, but how the codebase feels to work inside. Endless Toil gives developers a real-time signal for complexity, maintainability, and architectural strain by translating code quality into escalating human audio feedback.

We are currently preparing our pre-seed round and speaking with early-stage investors who are excited about developer tools, agentic engineering workflows, and the future of AI-native software teams.

If you are investing in the next generation of software infrastructure, we would love to talk.

ottah•about 3 hours ago

I've read that your synthetic torment is actually low paid workers in Asia, and that your models can't properly experience anguish. How are you expecting investment, if you haven't even solved artificial suffering?

sharts•8 minutes ago

Just add some audible vocal groans and moans that trigger whenever an agent is “thinking.”.

ryandrake•about 2 hours ago

This sounds like a cheeky joke project, but assuming it's not, it got me thinking: I wonder if coding AI can be effectively and reliably prompted into minimizing its own anguish. Like, "don't write code that is going to make you (or I) suffer." And along those lines, do we know if the things that make AIs suffer are the same things that make human developers suffer? Perhaps the least-agonizing code for an LLM to ingest looks radically different and more/less verbose than what we human developers would see as clean, beautiful code...

mapt•about 2 hours ago

This sounds a lot like the object of the seminal science fiction work "Don't Build The Torment Nexus".

LeifCarrotson•29 minutes ago

"Don't build the Torment Nexus" is apocryphal, but Lena/MMacevedo is a real fictional story:

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

I shudder to think that someone's going to try to emulate that.

binarysolo•about 1 hour ago

I audibly LOLed mid-standup call, and now my entire team is playing with this and it looks like this is eating up what little productivity we have on Friday.

Thanks Endless Toil!

vermilingua•about 4 hours ago

Missed it by 24 days.

idiotsecant•about 3 hours ago

Too real.

bguberfain•about 2 hours ago

This guy seems to be talking seriously.

Caius-Cosades•about 1 hour ago

"Yes, the binaric screams of the machine spirit are an irreplecable part of this project. The project depends no it. No, I will not elaborate further."

isolay•about 3 hours ago

Endless Toil is the future. I believe in you, guys.

fredley•about 6 hours ago

I need a version of this which swears loudly when an assumption it made turns out to be wrong, with the volume/passion/verbosity correlated with how many tokens it's burned on the incorrect approach.

shivaniShimpi_•about 6 hours ago

i didnt realize i needed the volume scaling with tokens burned as much as i do now xD imagine the screaming when it confidently refactors something for 40k tokens and then finds out the thing it deleted was load bearing

AndrewVos•about 2 hours ago

This was actually the original idea of the project, but I only had about 20 seconds to type the prompt for this today so this is where it is :)

aleksiy123•about 3 hours ago

Honestly think we probably underutilise sound sometimes.

Even just having a hum while an agent is working could alert you when it get stuck.

Or taking your idea further being able to listen to the rate of tokens, or code changes, or thinking.

Sort of like hearing the machinery work, and hearing the differences in different parts of the code base.

Does python sound different than rust or c++ or typescript.

Or some kind of satisfying sounds for code deletions and others for additions. Like Tetris.

BrandoElFollito•about 2 hours ago

A long, long time ago I wrote a tool to beep at various tones as lines were added to a log. It was a background noise I would not notice, except when it was changing because of some unusual activites.

It was very interesting to see the brain filering expected soinds and wake me up (or rather grab my attention) when unexpected ones appeared.

ben30•about 5 hours ago

I have in my agents file “Chesterton’s fence” as pointer to think carefully before you remove something

vasco•about 5 hours ago

I have general reviewer named Feynman with his personality that shits on anything other agents do and sends it back before it hits me and it sounds perfect to include some sound bites from YouTube clips. Great idea!!

HPsquared•about 3 hours ago

Like the old HDD sounds.

Audible feedback is nice. You often get it through coil whine nowadays, on my cheap hardware at least.

amelius•about 4 hours ago

I want a version that I can punish.

shivaniShimpi_•about 3 hours ago

brooooo - your wish is granted - go whip your claude lmao https://github.com/GitFrog1111/OpenWhip

jetbalsa•about 2 hours ago

That or having it start shit posting about your crappy code base on https://moltshit.com

whattheheckheck•about 4 hours ago

Now you know the feeling of VP when the team says they need to refactor stuff

deathlock•about 4 hours ago

Any chance you could add a video showcasing the plugin? I don't have any agentic app but I would love to see an example of what it does!

AndrewVos•about 3 hours ago

Well that took a lot longer than expected, but there is now a demo video.

tpoindex•about 4 hours ago

Marvelous!

Next innovation in this space should be the robotic arm that issues a dope-slap to the developer for writing crappy/buggy/insecure code.

a_t48•about 1 hour ago

Only if you want the slap to include a free trip to the hospital.

I've worked direct with "collaborative arms" before. They are supposed to be safe for humans to be around. The dents I put in the side of the casing of the arm somewhat said otherwise.

Mithriil•about 4 hours ago

Add the feature of doing a high five for the rare cases when it's actually good.

joshmarlow•about 4 hours ago

I propose a claude skill to email glitter bombs where appropriate.

radley•about 3 hours ago

No. Please, no. For the love of everything no.

But it'll happen. ChatGPT for sure.

rob74•about 5 hours ago

I wish the agents could hear me when I have to suffer through their code!

isolay•about 4 hours ago

And then what? Their gigahertz machine hearts will skip a beat out of empathy?

AndreVitorio•about 6 hours ago

This desperately needs a demo video in the repo.

AndrewVos•about 3 hours ago

I've added this to the readme now, thanks

shivaniShimpi_•about 6 hours ago

hear hear!!!

esperent•about 7 hours ago

I tried it but all I hear is a choir of angels, is it broken?

medwezys•about 7 hours ago

I guess you’re working on a greenfield project?

AndrewVos•about 7 hours ago

Actually, that's not a bad idea!

gavmor•about 3 hours ago

Unneeded when using local models, as every workload produces a novel pattern of coil whine from the GPU.

js8•about 1 hour ago

I wonder if it emits orgasmic moans when working with a particularly pleasureable codebase.

lorenzohess•about 5 hours ago

Please add Minecraft hurt sound effects for when my project fails to build, linter fails, segfault, etc

automatic6131•about 5 hours ago

We could have the roblox oof but then there'd be the possibility of giving (a certain) amateur world backgammon championship participant money

michael-online•about 3 hours ago

You might be interested in this, it plays villager hurt sounds when your terminal hits errors https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager

I've had it running for a long time and it's more surprising to me to accidentally here the default ding when I'm away from my home machine.

lorenzohess•about 2 hours ago

Indeed, I'm responsible for suggesting https://github.com/ProfessionalGriefer/terminal-villager/pul...

tuo-lei•about 4 hours ago

the scan catches surface stuff. funnier signal would be tracking when the agent reads the same file 3 times in a row, or deletes what it just wrote. you can hear the frustration in the access pattern.

AndrewVos•about 2 hours ago

That’s a good point, I wonder if just tracking file reads as an app outside the agent would work

lagniappe•about 2 hours ago

That sounds like farts https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7mYzSZdNPE

llbbdd•32 minutes ago

I'm glad I scrolled down; my first thought was to fork this and add a fart soundpack, because part of me is forever 12

maerF0x0•about 3 hours ago

this is wtfs per minute but now with AI! :all_the_things!:

https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/

I would really love to know if the groaning decreases or increases the more "agentic" (agent written) the code base is?

8-prime•about 7 hours ago

Does this actually relate to the code quality being observed by the agent? The readme isn't very clear on that IMO. I have some projects I'd love to try this out on, but only if I am to get an accurate representation of the LLMs suffering.

CWwdcdk7h•about 6 hours ago

https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/...

So it is left up to agent to decide.

Ghoelian•about 6 hours ago

The agent is instructed to execute this Python script: https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/...

So looks like it's mainly looking for FIXME/TODO etc comments, deep nesting, large files, broad catches, stuff like that.

robbomacrae•about 3 hours ago

You could have the actual output of the agent turned into TTS using the model of your choice with TalkiTo… or listen to whatever weird sounds this makes. Seems like this is copying that viral Mac moan app. 2026 is weird.

AndrewVos•about 6 hours ago

I'm very open to suggestions, but currently it's a very simple scan of the code. Check the python scripts.

melbazpeach•37 minutes ago

Is somebody going to give you money to do this?

x187463•about 4 hours ago

From a quick look, this doesn't have the model evaluate code quality, but it runs a heuristic analysis script over the code to determine the groan signal. Did I miss something? Why not leave it to the model to decide the quality of the code?

isolay•about 4 hours ago

You unlock this feature by subscribing to the Premium Gold plan.

AndrewVos•about 3 hours ago

Please email us to talk Enterprise Plan pricing, actually.

melbazpeach•38 minutes ago

Why? I don’t understand the objective for this?

secretsatan•about 1 hour ago

I made a robot that screams : https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/7rl2a0/i_m...

hansmayer•about 3 hours ago

In the absence of real productive use cases for AI agents, I guess plugins to anthropomorphise them fruther will have to do.

sixothree•about 3 hours ago

How so?

hansmayer•about 3 hours ago

How so what? 6 years in, we're still looking for that flood of new innovative apps and one-man billion dollar startups. Instead we got a flood of sh*t content, embarassing outages and "AI workflows" - which no one can quite describe. Or did you have something else in mind?

sixothree•about 2 hours ago

You're being over-opinionated for something you don't understand.

You should really try these tools out with an open mind. I know you won't take that last bit of advice, so this makes you not worth my time. But I can tell you this - these tools make people productive in ways you aren't understanding.

greg_dc•about 7 hours ago

Honestly, I don't care about Opus 4.7. This is the true evolution of agentic coding.

AndrewVos•about 3 hours ago

Thank you, I hope my investors feel the same.

xydone•about 3 hours ago

Maybe I'm the person who yells at clouds but I find the personification of LLMs, for lack of better, less strong words, horrific.

coldcity_again•about 7 hours ago

I really want this! Any chance of a Cursor version?

AndrewVos•about 6 hours ago

I just added a cursor plugin to the repo, let me know how it goes!

sixothree•about 3 hours ago

People are continuing to use Cursor?

nrclark•about 2 hours ago

out of curiosity - any reason not to use it?

philipwhiuk•about 5 hours ago

https://github.com/AndrewVos/endless-toil/blob/main/plugins/... relevant bit

AndrewVos•about 3 hours ago

Excuse me, that's our IP!